Undeclared war: how formality vanished from modern conflict

War without declaration: a standard nobody questions

In August 1939, Nancy Germany did not bother to send an ultimatum to Poland. Operation Himmler, a false-flag provocation at the Gleiwitz radio station using Dachau prisoners dressed in Polish uniforms, was enough to manufacture the casus belli. Eighty years later, the script repeats itself: Russia invades Ukraine without a formal declaration, Israel and Iran exchange attacks without a war document, and nobody expects a sealed telegram anymore. The question is why formality has died.

International law has left war in no man's land

The UN Charter prohibits war as an instrument of national policy. Only the Security Council can authorize the use of force, except in self-defense. Formally declaring a conflict turns it into "war" for all purposes: it activates the Geneva Convention, the rules on the treatment of prisoners, the obligation to pay compensation and the prosecution of war crimes. The solution has been to rebrand invasions as "special operations." It is not a mere euphemism: it prevents the state from assuming legal and financial responsibilities. If there is no official war, there are no widows' pensions to pay, nor reparations to negotiate.

The political costs of calling things by their name

A formal declaration brings general mobilization, a war economy, conscription, expropriations and, in many military codes, the death penalty. No democratic government wants to explain to its citizens that their Manhattan penthouse could vanish under a hypersonic missile in a declared war. Bureaucracy is also a classic brake: embassy officials and ministerial paperwork turn a declaration into an administrative headache. That is why the subtle gesture of a missile is preferred over the notarial document, as has been seen in recent decades: from Vietnam to Iraq, the great powers have steadily abandoned formality.

Hybrid warfare and the ghost of Gerasimov

The Russian military doctrine known as Gerasimov no longer conceives of war as a duel between armies with a prior manifesto. Victory is pursued by destabilizing the adversary by every means: cyber, economic, media-related and, only at the end, military. In that logic, declaring war is a romantic, almost nineteenth-century gesture. Some historical analyses recall that in Antiquity armies simply subdued their neighbors without warning; the formal declaration was a modern and short-lived invention.

When the families of Russian diplomats left Washington and the embassies were reduced to minimal staffing levels, nobody needed a declaration of war to read the signal. Subtle gestures have replaced manifestos. Formal war has not disappeared: it has become unnecessary. Perhaps that is the most unsettling fact.